Profile of High School Special Education

 S pe cialEducation inAmerica The state of students with disabilities in the nation's high schools

Christopher B. Swanson, Ph.D.

Director Editorial Projects in Education Research Center

November 3, 2008

About This Report

This report examining special education in the nation's high schools was prepared by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Editorial Projects in Education is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization based in Bethesda, Md. Its primary mission is to help raise the level of awareness and understanding among professionals and the public of important issues in American education. EPE covers local, state, national, and international news and issues from preschool through the 12th grade. Editorial Projects in Education Inc. publishes Education Week, America's newspaper of record for precollegiate education, Teacher Magazine, , and the Top School Jobs employment resource. It also produces periodic special reports on issues ranging from technology to textbooks, as well as books of special interest to educators.

The EPE Research Center, a division of Editorial Projects in Education, conducts annual policy surveys, collects data, and performs analyses that appear in the Quality Counts, Technology Counts, and Diplomas Count annual reports. The center also produces independent research reports, contributes data and analysis to special coverage in Education Week, Teacher Magazine, and , publishes the monthly Research Connections Newsletter, hosts live Web chats on research topics, and maintains the Education Counts and EdWeek Maps online data resources. The EPE Research Center can be found online at rc.

We would like to extend our thanks to our program officers at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their support of this work. Several reviewers also provided insightful and constructive comments on earlier report drafts. Several current and former members of the EPE Research Center contributed to this report: Carole Vinograd Bausell, Rachael Delgado, Kathryn Dorko, Sterling Lloyd, Patrick Miller, and Hajime Mitani.

Editorial Projects in Education Research Center

Director Christopher B. Swanson Deputy Director Amy M. Hightower Senior Research Associate Sterling C. Lloyd Research Analyst Hajime Mitani Research Associates Holly Kosiewicz

Alexis Reed Rebecca Wittenstein

Research Interns Bonnie Ho Erin Pollard Sahar Sattarzadeh

Library Director Kathryn Dorko News Research Librarian Rachael Delgado

Copyright ? 2008 by Editorial Projects in Education Inc. All rights reserved.

Editorial Projects in Education 6935 Arlington Road Bethesda MD 20814

Table of Contents

Executive Summary....................................................................................................................................... 1 A Portrait of High School Special Education ................................................................................................. 3 Educational Settings...................................................................................................................................... 4 Diagnosing Disabilities .................................................................................................................................. 8 Disproportionate Representation............................................................................................................... 10 School Discipline ......................................................................................................................................... 14 Academic Achievement .............................................................................................................................. 15 High School Completion.............................................................................................................................. 19 Transitions to Adulthood ............................................................................................................................ 22 Conclusions--Directions for Policy and Practice ........................................................................................ 25 Endnotes ..................................................................................................................................................... 26 RESOURCE APPENDIX.................................................................................................................................. 29

Organizations........................................................................................................................................ 29 Legal Resources .................................................................................................................................... 30 Selected Reports/Studies ..................................................................................................................... 31 Special Education Journals ................................................................................................................... 33 Data Resources ..................................................................................................................................... 33 Selected Experts ................................................................................................................................... 34

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Special Education in America

Executive Summary

The nation's public school systems collectively educate more than 6 million students with disabilities, about nine percent of the school-age population. Nearly one-third of those disabled students are of traditional high school age. This new report from the EPE Research Center examines a variety of challenges crucial to understanding special education in today's high schools, including the types of educational settings in which services are provided, the diagnosis of disabilities, overrepresentation of particular student groups, school discipline, academic achievement, high school completion and transitions into adulthood.

What do we know about students with disabilities today?

More than at any other time in the history of American education, youth with disabilities receive instruction in school settings similar to those serving the general student population, continuing the trend of mainstreaming. This movement toward greater educational inclusion has resulted from decades of litigation, federal law, and local policymaking. The total number of students in special education programs is also on the rise, a development fueled in large part by rapid growth in two particular disability categories--Other Health Impairments (which includes attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or ADHD) and Specific Learning Disabilities (which encompasses a wide variety of diagnoses that do not fit under other existing classifications).

The choice of method for diagnosing disabilities remains a contentious issue. A new approach to identifying learning disabilities recognized by the 2004 reauthorization of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)--Response to Intervention or RTI--has emerged as an alternative to traditional discrepancy-based models. The severity of disabilities generally falls along a wide continuum. As a result, it can prove difficult to accurately identify certain conditions or to distinguish between a student who exhibits low achievement due to a disability and one whose low performance is attributable to other factors. The sensitivity and accuracy of procedures for diagnosing disabilities are, therefore, critical factors in the provision of special education services.

Controversy over the rates at which certain demographic or socioeconomic groups are represented within the population of students with disabilities remains a prominent feature of public debates over special education. This report and other research consistently find that particular student groups are much more likely to be enrolled in special education programs. African Americans students are identified with disabilities 40 percent more often than the national average and are twice as likely to receive diagnoses for mental retardation and emotional disturbance. Native Americans are also numerically overrepresented in special education, while Asian Americans are underrepresented. White and Hispanic students fall close to the national average. Across racial and ethnic groups males are diagnosed with disabilities at two times the rate of female students. Research demonstrates clear patterns of numerical overrepresentation for certain groups. However, much less is known about the more complex dimensions of the phenomenon, including the underlying patterns of risk for experiencing a disability (which may differ across subgroups) and the implications of local variations in diagnostic and referral procedures.

In terms of school experiences and outcomes, special education students are generally more likely to become involved in major disciplinary incidents like suspensions and expulsions than are their peers in general education programs. Likewise, students with disabilities attain significantly lower levels of academic performance than the average student. In both cases, however, we observe a great deal of variation within the special education population, with certain disability classifications much more likely to be associated with negative educational outcomes. Such achievement gaps have gained new salience given the rise of performance-based school accountability and the increasing inclusion of students with disabilities in both federal and state testing and accountability systems.

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Special Education in America

Completing high school and transitioning into adulthood represent critical stages of life for all young people. Students with disabilities, like their peers, aspire to take part in a wide range of activities as they leave high school and enter adult life. Yet, our analysis shows that students with disabilities graduate from high school at lower rates than their peers. In addition, compared with the general student population, those disabled student who do finish high school appear to be more likely to earn an alternative credential as opposed to a regular diploma. Once they are out of high school, students with disabilities follow a wide variety of paths. Nearly 8 in 10 of those young adults engage in some form of activity related to employment or postsecondary education, with many pursuing both. Such a diverse range of outcomes poses significant challenges for the secondary education programs charged with preparing students with disabilities for the transition into adult life.

How can we strengthen special education for tomorrow's students?

A number of concerns repeatedly surfaced in our investigation of the factors that define the state of special education in the nation's high schools. We believe that attention to these issues can help to strengthen the future efforts of both policymakers and educators.

Knowledge is Power--Detailed, high-quality data on the population of students with disabilities represents a

critical foundation of knowledge necessary to inform the broader enterprise of special education, through monitoring and evaluating the quality of services, tracking the outcomes of students with disabilities, setting realistic but meaningful expectations for performance, and developing more effective and well-calibrated approaches to policymaking and school-based practice.

Filling in the Gaps--Attempts to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of high school-age special

education students continue to be hampered by two central factors. First, widely accessible data and research on students with disabilities tend to deal with very broad age ranges, which makes it difficult (if not impossible) to focus specifically on high school-age students. In addition, those studies and data collections often involve only the disabled population. While such sources--to varying degrees--provide valuable insights on students with disabilities, they may offer no way to directly compare their experiences with those of the general, nondisabled student population.

Appreciating Diversity--The disabled population is clearly not monolithic. Across virtually any dimension that

can be examined, we find significant differences in outcomes and experiences. In particular, such considerations as the type and severity of an individual's disability appear to reach into every aspect of life. Nonetheless, students with disabilities are often discussed by the public and treated by policy as if they were a homogenous group with a common set of capabilities and needs. The next generation of educational policy and practice should be guided by a more enlightened understanding of diversity within the population of individuals with disabilities.

Opening the Black Box--In some respects, this report on special education at the high school level may be

noteworthy for what it has not been able to examine. For example, not much has been said regarding the specific types of services received by special education students or their quality. The reason for this omission is that surprisingly little is really known. Federal and state agencies routinely collect data about the inputs and outputs of special education, the characteristics of students with disabilities and certain outcomes. But comparatively scant attention has been devoted to systematically understanding the process through which special education services are delivered and the effectiveness of those services. As is true more generally of American education, what goes on within the schoolhouse--whether in a mainstream classroom or a pull-out session for students with disabilities--has long been considered an exclusive purview of local educators. Efforts to accurately identify and diagnose students with disabilities, to ensure that appropriate services are planned and delivered, to evaluate the quality of services, and to develop and disseminate effective interventions can progress only so far until a concerted and broad-based effort is made to truly open the proverbial black box and examine actual the process and practice of special education.

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